Today we have a band that needs no introduction, Lacuna Coil. “Dark Adrenaline” is the Italian gothic metal band’s sixth album. It should come as no surprise that the album sounds great; Lacuna Coil’s track record for quality work is well established. I was, however, surprised and pleased to see they do a cover of R.E.M.s “Losing My Religion.” Previously, on “Karmacode”, they covered Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” I enjoy hearing old pop and rock songs redone proper by metal bands.

One thing I’ve been curious about is that Andrea Ferro does a hell of a lot of singing in the band, yet I only ever hear about Cristina Scabbia when people talk about Lacuna Coil. I guess that’s because Cristina is ridiculously hot and both the media and the fans like to focus on her. But damn, the dude has got some great pipes. Before I really ever paid much attention to Lacuna Coil I thought Cristina was the main and only singer; once I started listening I was like “oh, who is this guy that is singing all over the place?” I really enjoy that there are male and female clean vocals and that rather than one or the other doing just back-up they both sing lead.

In case you are in the minority of metal fans who aren’t familiar with Lacuna Coil, and you are wondering what you’ll get with this album, let me give you a little info. The music is fairly heavy and grandiose in a melodic gothic way. It’s heavier than your run-of-the-mill Evanescence clones and, as I’ve pointed out, has plenty of clean dude vox as well. The songs are huge and sound like they fill every crack and corner of the room with their presence. There’s a good punch to the mix but not in an overly bass-heavy way; they are just really dense. And if you like melodic catchy songs you are in for a treat.

By this point you are reading this and either totally psyched for the new Lacuna Coil album or throwing up in your mouth a little at the blatant commercialism and wishing I would write about something like Dodecahedron or the upcoming Psycroptic album. Yeah, metal covers a great deal of sonic ground. I seriously doubt there is any metal band out there that is beloved by all metal fans; we’ve always got some gripe about somebody. I do it too, but I like to think I have a very wide scope of acceptance for different genres of metal. I’m going through more of an extreme metal phase at the moment (doom was my last phase) but I can still sit back and enjoy a great album like “Dark Adrenaline” any day of the week.